


circadian rhythm

by scionblad



Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Alternate Universe - Art School, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Fashion School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Breaking Up & Making Up, Established Relationship, Family Drama, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Relationship Problems, Smoking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-02-05 10:51:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12793011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scionblad/pseuds/scionblad
Summary: Takumi thinks it unfair he knows so little about Leon's family, then inadvertently finds out more at his internship, which has some consequences for his relationship with Leon.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this has been sitting in my drafts for a while but alas i'm too jumpy and want to get it all out now. without further ado, here it is, in all its self-indulgent shamelessness: the leokumi art (fashion) school au
> 
> formerly titled: starry eyes colliding

His phone reads 2:04 AM. Takumi puts it back on the desk and tries to concentrate on the text about Italian fashion houses.

Oboro looks up from her phone and watches him with concerned eyes. She doesn’t say anything. Their history lecture is tomorrow at noon, but neither of them are concentrating very hard on reading—in three weeks, they won’t bother at all, but this early in the semester Takumi insists they try. Oboro rolled her eyes at him and gave up twenty minutes in. She’s been lying on her bed scrolling through Pinterest for the last hour. She had made them both cups of tea when they’d sat down in her room to start reading, but now they sit untouched on the desk, cold and bitter.

He makes an absent-minded mark in the notebook he’d been taking notes in and fans himself. The room is too hot. Oboro has turned the thermostat up way too high even though it’s only early September and summer still lingers in the city. He flips his bangs back, only to have them flop onto his forehead again, sticky with sweat.

“Damn it, Oboro, it’s a thousand degrees in here,” he grumbles.

“You just wrote ‘Leon’ in your notebook,” she replies.

He stares at her. “What’s that have to do with anything?”

“Well, clearly, you’re not going to get any reading done with your head in the clouds, loverboy.” Oboro pins another picture to her Pinterest board. “Where is Prince Uncharming anyway?”

“Don’t call him that,” says Takumi, ignoring her question.

“It’s true,” she says. “He’s super fake-charming.”

Takumi looks down at his notebook. In his restless handwriting it says,  _ the success of the shows meant Italian fashion labels like Salvatore Ferragamo, Valentino, Leon— _ it stops there. Leon isn’t a fashion label.

“Leon isn’t a fashion label,” he says dumbly.

Oboro looks at him like he’s got two heads. “No, he’s not,” she says. “You should just go sleep. Doing the reading is pointless anyway.”

Takumi looks at his phone, dark and silent.

A knock on the door of their apartment suite makes them both jump. Oboro leaves to answer it, and Takumi slouches over and presses the home button on his phone again. 2:23 AM. The words in his reading seem to float around and jumble together into Italian nonsense.

“Oh, it’s you,” Oboro’s voice says from the kitchen. “He’s in here.”

She comes back into her room, followed by a familiar sight in black. Takumi stands up quickly.

“Hey,” says Leon. 

“Hey,” says Takumi, a little bashfully. He feels a little unsteady, like his heart might jump out and run over to the doorway. Leon’s all dressed up for some reason, wearing a suit with a polka-dot tie. It looks good.

Oboro’s eyes travel between both of them. “Get out of my room,” she says.

They go to Takumi’s room. It’s empty; Hinata is pulling an all-nighter somewhere in the building on 13 th street. Leon loosens his tie, sheds his suit jacket, and climbs immediately into Takumi’s unmade bed. He wraps himself in the blanket and closes his eyes.

“Ass,” says Takumi, but climbs in after him. Leon brushes aside Takumi’s long hair and nestles his head under Takumi’s chin, an arm draped loosely over his waist. Takumi’s skin tingles where fingers meet his ribcage, the bone of his hip, his navel. For a while, they say nothing, the breezy gust of the air conditioner providing the only noise, Leon’s breathing the only rhythm.

“Where were you?” Takumi asks quietly, running a thumb over Leon’s slender knuckles. “You didn’t answer my texts.”

Leon doesn’t answer immediately, just keeps breathing that even, steady rhythm. “Family affair,” he says finally.

Family. Takumi recalls a hazy memory of a photograph, of Leon with his half-siblings, Marx, Camilla, Elise. No parents or other relatives, just Marx looking vaguely anxious, Camilla looking elegantly composed, and Elise positively effervescent. He met Elise once, when he and Sakura took her to the izakaya on St. Marks Place and she practically bounced off walls at the sheer novelty of the entire experience. The other siblings are mere phantoms, and Leon’s parents simply shadows following unnamed mentions.

Leon is still silent, breathing slowly, his weight comfortable on Takumi’s side.

“Well, how was it?” Takumi prompts him.

A noncommittal noise against his collarbone. “It was nothing special.” 

So tight-lipped, Takumi thinks. By now, Leon has probably gotten at least a basic idea of what Takumi’s own siblings are like—shy (Sakura), headstrong (Hinoka), and overwhelmingly perfect (Ryouma)—and how Takumi moved around often, spending summers in Japan and school years in America. It’s a little unfair. Takumi watches Leon run his hand up Takumi’s shirt, settling cool fingers flat on his chest. 

“When is your class tomorrow?” Leon asks.

“Noon.”

“Good.” Leon shifts, putting weight on his elbows, until he’s half-hovering over Takumi. He’s pulled the edge of Takumi’s shirt up high enough so it’s exposing his chest.

Takumi closes his eyes and lets Leon kiss him. He tastes like cigarettes and—Takumi furrows his brows a little bit—a bit like alcohol, too. Champagne, maybe. He draws back.

“Have you been drinking?” he asks. 

Leon’s eyes study him in the dim light, his fingers still tracing patterns on top of Takumi’s ribs. “Yes,” he answers. “But only a little.”

He leans back in to kiss Takumi again, more daring this time, with nips of teeth and searching tongue, a hand creeping down to unbutton Takumi’s jeans. Between the haze of the kiss and of Leon’s thigh pressing between his legs, Takumi thinks rather thoughtlessly,  _ I hope wherever you were, you weren’t forgetting about me. _

He reaches a hand up to grasp Leon’s pale hair behind his ear.  _ Don’t forget me _ . 

* * *

 

The Q train going uptown on weekday mornings is an absolute nightmare. It’s packed with people from door to door, people in suits and briefcases and shoes pumping with the workday grind. Takumi manages to squeeze into a spot between the door and a seat, wiggles a hand onto a steel pole, and hangs on for dear life. 

It takes him two stops up to Times Square, but his real destination is a few blocks over, to a building part concrete and part glass, gold letters printed on the door reading  _ Vindam Corporation _ . The woman at the front desk directs him up a large mirrored elevator and through a tiled lobby to another woman at a desk, where he gives his name a bit self-consciously and sits down to wait. He wonders if he should have dyed his hair back to its natural black the week before, just to look more presentable, but tries to reassure himself that Vindam didn’t really mind at all.

A woman with long red hair comes out after fifteen minutes and calls him into the office. Takumi buttons his jacket nervously and shakes her hand. “Takumi Yamato,” he says, hoping she doesn’t hear his voice waver a bit.

“Luna,” she says somewhat curtly. “Have a seat.”

The interview goes fairly smoothly and quickly. She gives the usual spiel of questions like “What made you decide to work for this company?” and “What do you feel are your greatest strengths?” The only thing unusual is towards the end, when she asks him if he has any questions, and he’s about to answer when there’s a soft but insistent knock on the door.

Luna sighs exasperatedly. “Sorry about this,” she says to Takumi. “Come in.”

Takumi turns in his chair to look at the person entering the room, and feels his mouth pop open inadvertently.

She looks exactly the same as in photographs. Her imposing figure fills the doorway, with pleasing curves and soft face set in a gentle smile. Her hair is long and curled, shining in the morning light that streams into the office. Takumi would recognize the lavender shade anywhere.

“Camilla,” Luna says with a sigh and rub of her forehead. “I’m trying to conduct an interview here.”

“But of course,” says Camilla, still smiling easily. “I thought I’d pop by to see which lovely candidate you had today.” She turns her gaze to Takumi. “And oh, aren’t you a cute one?”

He feels his face heat up. Realizing his mouth is still open, he promptly clamps his jaw and turns back around, fixing his gaze on a pen sitting on the desk. Her eyes look like Leon’s, rich warm brown with heavy eyelids and long lashes.

She walks around to the other side of Luna’s desk and props her elbows on a stack of papers. “Luna, don’t you think he looks familiar? He reminds me of someone I know.”

“Do you want his resume?”

“No, no.” Camilla waves her hand. “I just… hmm… You’re a student, right? Where do you go to school…?”

“Takumi,” he supplies. “I, uh, go to Valla School for Design.”

“Ah! I went there, too.” She beams at him. “Do you know someone there named Leon? My younger brother. He goes there as well.”

He swallows nervously. “Y-yes?”

“I think that’s it,” Camilla says after a moment. “He seems very much like Leon. Don’t you think so, Luna? They could be twins!”

“Sure.”

Camilla studies him again, but this time her eyes seem less warm and more calculating—a look he’s seen on Leon many times, when he’s thinking about how to piece things together, how to build a dress out of squares of fabric, how to dye something into the color fields he wants. Takumi squirms. He should’ve done more research into the company before getting to the interview stage.

After a moment, something seems to click in her brain, and she nods, pleased with the conclusion she’s come to. “Luna, dear,” she says, putting a hand on Luna’s shoulder. “Let’s hire him.”

Luna sputters. “But, there are others—!”

“I think he will be more than capable for this job,” Camilla says with a satisfied hum. “Do you accept?”

Takumi realizes after a few seconds that the question is directed towards him, and the words trip over themselves to stumble out of his mouth. “I—uh—yes! Of course!” he says, hands shaking with something between nervousness and excitement.

She smiles at him. “Good. Luna will email you with details of when you start, okay?”

And with a swish of her purple hair, she’s gone. Luna scowls at her retreating backside before sighing.

“Well,” she says to Takumi, brushing red bangs off her face. “I guess you’re hired. Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” he says, still a little confused.

She looks at him a bit strangely. “You can go now, you know.”

He’s still sitting in the chair. With a hurried apology he jumps up and scrambles to leave the office, his heart still racing from sheer wild confusion.

* * *

 

On Friday night, they pass the time in Leon’s room. Zero raises an eyebrow at them and moves his laptop out into the kitchen area to edit photos undisturbed. Takumi pulls up a Wes Anderson movie on Leon’s small TV screen and Leon leans his head on Takumi’s shoulder and starts moving his hands in the darkness.

It takes about thirty minutes into the film for Takumi to realize that Leon’s knitting. What exactly is coming out of those needles, Takumi can’t tell.

“What are you making?” 

“A square,” says Leon absently. He loops another bit of yarn around the stick.

“What, for fun?”

“Homework.”

“It’s Friday.”

“I know.”

“You work too hard,” says Takumi. It isn’t a criticism or an opinion, just a statement. Leon’s hands still. A few heartbeats pass. Takumi breathes.

“Maybe,” mutters Leon, and he goes back to adding more loops to his knitted square. “Didn’t you have a job interview today?”

“Oh,” says Takumi. He thinks about Camilla’s eyes, somewhat sleepy-looking but pretty in color like Leon’s. “Yeah.”

“How did it go? I recall you being overly nervous.”

Takumi makes a face. “Well, I wasn’t  _ that  _ nervous.”

“You were,” Leon says. “The night before, you kept doing that thing where you kept your arms crossed and your face did the pouty thing.”

“What pouty thing? I do not do any pouty thing.”

Leon laughs a little. “You didn’t say if it went well or not,” he says, ignoring Takumi’s only half-hearted glare, his warm eyes cast to his colorful square of yarn.

“Fine. I got the job.”

“Really?” Takumi feels Leon shift next to him, rearranging head and neck and shoulders. “Remind me where your job was again?”

“Vindam,” says Takumi.

Leon’s hands still again. The movie rushes in front of them in whirls of color, but Takumi’s gaze remains fixed on the little blue light in the corner of the monitor, the one that says it’s on. He tries not to move. It feels like Leon’s head will drop off his shoulder any moment and break into little pieces in Takumi’s lap.

After a moment, Leon says, “Well, congratulations.”

“Thanks,” says Takumi, but neither one of them seems to mean it with any warmth. The coldness slowly sets into Takumi’s side. None of it—this—surprises him. He’s almost certain that Leon is thinking a lot, because he can almost hear it clicking inside Leon’s brain, and the noise sounds a little bit like Camilla’s high heels. Takumi waits, hoping near desperately Leon might say something else anyway, change the subject like always.

Nothing. Leon’s hands tie more loops into the square in a steady, practiced fashion. The movie keeps playing, but neither of them seems to be paying attention anymore.

* * *

 

Takumi crosses his arms and stares at his dress form. He’s been trying to drape this garment for an hour, but he keeps thinking about last night and Leon knitting. Oboro says the knitting elective is relaxing. The professor is sweet and the three hours allotted for class is spent just knitting with calming music playing over the speakers. In Takumi’s head it ends up becoming a stupid image of Leon sitting in a rocking chair like he’s someone’s grandma and mass-producing big black turtleneck sweaters out of two tiny needles. The mannequin in front of Takumi is half-covered in what would probably be the most scandalous dress ever worn, if it were completed. It’s not.

He plays with the pins on his pincushion, pulling one out to stick between his teeth while he decides what to do with the remaining fabric.

Somehow it feels like he said something wrong on that day, like he accidentally shot a needle straight between Leon’s ribs and into his heart, buried deep where he couldn’t see. Though, Takumi thinks, rolling the pin back and forth between his incisors, it’s hard to tell with Leon. He could chalk everything up to stress, though this early in the semester it seems hardly likely. The radio silence worries him, sure, but truthfully it’s doubtful that Leon will ever say straight up what’s going on, anyway. Leon just doesn’t do that. After all, he never said anything about his sister working for Vindam. 

He leans his head on the wall. It feels better to think of it that way than for him to have learned of it through some Internet search. 

He slides the pin out from his mouth and stabs it almost viciously into the dress form’s chest. Then he picks up his phone. Leon still hasn’t texted him. 

It seems to be a recurring pattern these days, Takumi thinks a little bitterly, tossing the phone back onto his bed. Wait five years for a text, and then jump up all excited like a puppy, then have Leon turn back into an emotionless block and wait another five years for a text. Oboro’s right. He’s pathetically lovesick. No more of that. 

His phone vibrates. He almost leaps at it to see the sender.

It isn’t Leon. His heart sinks.

It is, however, from Luna.  _ Rehearsals for Vindam’s NYFW start tomorrow,  _ it says.  _ I know we’ve only just hired you, but we’re short on hands this year and need people to help dress the models and set up. Please come on Sunday 2:00pm to Skylight Clarkson Sq entrance on— _

He stops reading. He’s so tired. 

* * *

 

Luna gives a briefing to him and the rest of the interns about what to do, how to set up, when to show up and what to wear, etc. He tunes the majority of it out, storing only important details away from later. He still has to draw twenty  _ croquis _ for a concept involving hoods when he gets home, and then after that he has to finish draping the garment that he started last night, and then he has to go do research for another fashion concept involving uniforms.

Takumi rubs his eyes with his knuckles. He’s so tired, and it’s only September, for fucks’ sake.

He’s partnered with a blond girl named Charlotte to dress some of the models. They get taught the proper way to do it, so not to accidentally damage or tear any of the clothes, and then they spend the rest of the time sitting in a static pool of downtime. Charlotte puts her weight on one leg and starts messing around on her phone. Takumi puts his hands in his pockets and subtly checks for a text from Leon. There’s none.

“Takumi!”

Takumi looks up to see Camilla’s head poking through the curtain entrance. She beams at him and places a hand on his shoulder. “How are you?”

“F-fine,” he says, thoroughly unsure of how he should react.

“You’re liking the job?” She laughs a little behind a manicured hand. “I am truly sorry that you have to work like this so early in.”

“It’s fine,” he says. “The experience is great.”

Camilla gives him a smile. “Good. I’ll be seeing you, okay?” She nods at Charlotte, who is suddenly all smiles, and several of the other interns before seeing her way out.

Takumi stares at the door, a bit dumbfounded.

“So, I didn’t know you knew Camilla?” Charlotte’s phone is gone, nowhere in sight. She’s turned her blue eyes on Takumi instead. Takumi leans away from her a bit so her mildly obnoxious voice doesn’t fall too painfully on his ears.

“I don’t,” he admits. “She just likes me, for some reason.”

“Oh,” says Charlotte. She retreats a little, back to her phone. “Well, you could get some serious favors in the company through her, or her brother. I’m just saying.”

“Her brother?”

“Oh, you didn’t know? Wow, you really must be new.” Charlotte brushes a lock of blonde hair over her shoulder. “Well, the company is super family-centered. Camilla’s just one of many half-siblings whose dad is the late CEO. Her older half-brother, Marx? He’s the CEO.”

“CEO?” Takumi says with a bit of disbelief. “Isn’t Marx, what, twenty-something?”

Charlotte gives him a distinctly patronizing look. “He’s  _ at least  _ thirty. There’s no way someone  _ that  _ attractive is only in his twenties and unmarried.”

Takumi fiddles with the clasp of a pair of shoes, just for something to do with his hands.

“Anyway,” continues Charlotte, “Camilla’s mom was like, one of the top creative directors, which is mostly why Camilla’s up there now. The same with a few of the other kids’ moms, I think.”

“Like who?” ventures Takumi.

“Jesus, I don’t know all of them, there are a bunch, okay.” Charlotte rolls her eyes at him. “Oh wait, no there’s Beatrix! She’s the current creative director right now. God, I hate her.”

“Beatrix?” Takumi puts the shoes down. “Who’s her kid?”

“Leon, I think,” Charlotte says offhandedly. “But yeah, fuck, Beatrix is like, insanely picky all the time, I hate when she shows up at the office…”

She keeps talking, but Takumi tunes her out. Leon’s mom, the creative director of Vindam. Leon, studying at Valla to follow in her footsteps.

He almost throws the shoes across the room. This is messed up.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the wait!! and thank you kindly everyone for the kudos/subscriptions/single comment (i see you!! i see you!!)
> 
> can you believe i started writing this fic over two years ago? it's actually hard for me to switch back to present tense for this because i don't really write in present anymore. (the next update may take longer, depending; the next month for me is gonna be pretty hectic.)
> 
> anyway: enjoy!!

On Fridays, Takumi doesn’t have classes, but Leon gets out of his studio class at three o’clock, so he busies himself by playing a few levels of Hinata’s weird hack-and-slash video game and doing some homework.

At precisely two o’clock there’s a knock on their door. No one else is home—Oboro is in class, the same one as Leon’s, in fact, and Hinata usually takes the Friday afternoon to work with his friends in the same major—so Takumi leaves the video game running and answers the door.

“Bathroom,” says Leon immediately, and he pushes past Takumi and makes a beeline for the toilet. Takumi barely has time to register that he’s pale and hunched over enough that his long wool coat brushes on the ground.

The bathroom door hangs open, ajar in Leon’s rush. Takumi makes a face and peeks through. “Leon?”

The sound of retching answers him. Leon is on his knees, holding the bowl with both hands, his pretty fair hair drooping down towards the water.

Takumi watches Leon heaving breaths, echoing around the bathroom, for a moment, before kneeling down and pushing Leon’s hair off his forehead.

“What happened?” he asks quietly.

“Bad sushi,” says Leon after a measured pause.

“You couldn’t puke in your own toilet?”

“Forgot my key.”

That sounds like a lie. Leon’s prone to absent minded things like wearing his sweater inside out or forgetting to eat but Takumi hears lies, lies, lies, and it’s  _ annoying. _

Leon vomits again, and Takumi rubs his back until it passes. After he finishes, he flushes the toilet, and stands up, wiping his mouth and teary eyes with toilet paper and blowing his nose briskly, as if nothing had happened.

“You should lie down and rest. Maybe Zero or Odin are home right now,” says Takumi. “We can go and che—”

“No,” says Leon quickly. “No, we can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because no one’s home,” Leon insists. “I’ll just ask Oboro to bring my stuff up after class ends.”

Takumi frowns. “But there’s still more than an hour left. You’re really gonna make Oboro bring all your stuff up?”

“It’s fine,” says Leon.

Something about the set of the corners of his mouth tells Takumi that he isn’t going to say any more. He texts Oboro a little grudgingly, preparing himself for Oboro’s biting snark at having to carry all of Leon’s fabric and paper and project up to their dorm.

**Takumi:** leon wants u to carry his shit up to our room

She responds almost immediately, despite being in class.

**Oboro:** oh that’s where he is?

**Oboro:** heh. finding comfort in his boyfriend’s arms

**Takumi:** what?

**Oboro:** he didn’t tell u?

**Takumi:** no

**Takumi:** he just came in and threw up and told me it was ‘bad sushi’

**Oboro:** WOW

**Oboro:** look ok ill tel u later profs giving me dirty looks

Takumi stares at his phone, dumbfounded. She hadn’t even said whether she would carry Leon’s bags up.

Leon is sitting at the kitchen table, sipping on a glass of water and looking through his phone, when Takumi comes out of his room. Wordlessly, Takumi sits down.

For a while, they sit in silence, Leon on his phone, Takumi not. Instead he thinks briefly about the one time he and Leon had gone to get sushi, with Elise and Sakura in a small restaurant on St. Mark’s Place. Something about the way that Leon had silently tucked the bites in his mouth made Takumi think, then, that Leon didn’t like sushi. Maybe the slimy texture or too flat a taste or the odd sweetness of the rice.

Of course, restaurant sushi is better than the cheap kind that sits around in grocery stores, but he can’t imagine Leon going out of his way to buy the low-quality version of something he didn’t even like.

He might be paranoid. Leon, across the table, seems to look a bit better now, the color returning to his complexion. Takumi watches him take a sip from the glass.

“Do you want to lie down?” he asks.

Leon gives him a look. “No.” He pauses. “Maybe.”

“I’ll lie down with you.”

Leon’s eyes waver a bit. Takumi scratches the back of his neck and fixes his gaze on Leon with equal amounts irritation and nervousness. He hates this, Leon being hesitant like he doesn’t think Takumi can handle it, like Takumi’s too, he doesn’t know,  _ emotional _ or something lame like that.

Finally, Leon exhales. “All right,” he says.

They squeeze into the twin-size bed meant for one person, though they’re both skinny enough to fit. Leon wraps his arms around Takumi’s neck. It feels tender and intimate, but Takumi can’t appreciate it in the moment.

“Is your professor gonna be okay with you skipping the last half of class?” he asks into the afternoon light flooding the room.

“Yes,” says Leon sleepily. “I haven’t skipped class at all yet.”

“Good for you,” says Takumi, staring at the ceiling.

The light from the sun peeking out behind the clouds stretches across the room in warm brightness. Leon’s breathing steadies quickly. He’s asleep within the half-hour—for all that had happened, he must really have been exhausted by whatever terrifying ordeal he went through—and Takumi, filled with restless energy, watches YouTube videos on his phone until he hears Oboro come home.

He looks down at Leon, whose head is on his shoulder, still asleep, and not liable to budge anywhere for anytime soon. He exhausts himself out too often, Takumi thinks, taking too many classes and pursuing too many things. Keeping too many secrets until it spilled out of his mouth in all the wrong ways, unpleasant and acrid.

Oboro drops Leon’s bags unceremoniously on the floor outside Takumi’s bedroom door as he extracts himself from Leon’s sleepy grip. “Coffee?” she says, less a question and more a signal with raised eyebrows.

“Sure,” says Takumi, feeling jittery at the prospect of answers.

He leaves Leon in his bed with a text that says  _ grabbing coffee with oboro; call me later?  _ and heads out with Oboro to the local coffee shop around the corner. She doesn’t say anything while they stand in line, leaving him fidgeting through every nervous habit he’s had as a kid—picking his cuticles, scratching his ears, chewing his lip.

“Chill,” Oboro says.

“Can’t help it,” he mumbles begrudgingly.

When they finally sit down for Oboro to tell the story, she hesitates a little bit, looking from side to side at the batches of students from their school waiting in line to fuel their perpetual caffeine fix. Takumi taps his finger impatiently on the table.

“Well,” she starts slowly, then stops.

“Well?”

She chews her lip for a moment. Then, her mind seemingly made up, she sits up a bit straighter, leans forward towards Takumi, darts her eyes left and right for a second more before speaking.

“So we had some guests come into critique today, for our in-progress stuff,” she starts.

“Already?”

“ _ Yes _ , and don’t interrupt me.” Her eyes flash, irritated. “Anyway, it was all kind of last-minute; like the person was a friend of our teacher’s and wanted to just come and see, since they’re hiring for interns.”

“Okay.”

“And, well.” Oboro pauses, twists her mouth into a reluctant expression. “The guest was Leon’s mom.”

Takumi stares at her. She takes a sip of her coffee.

“Shut the fuck up,” says Takumi.

Oboro raises her eyebrows and purses her lips, as if to say,  _ I’ve shut the fuck up. _

“That can’t be it, though,” says Takumi, his thoughts tumbling off his tongue without so much as a modicum of inhibition. “No way. There had to be something else. She said something awful to him, didn’t she.”

She shrugs mysteriously, which he takes for her dramatic way of saying yes.

Takumi slumps back against his chair and taps his fingers. It’s the second time anyone’s mentioned Leon’s mom, and he feels like he shouldn’t be surprised that neither of those times were brought up by Leon himself. It feels bad. Maybe this is how college relationships work—you meet, you talk about interests and life, maybe your family—no, no, you would definitely talk about family—wouldn’t you? The half-siblings he knows about, for sure, because Elise is Sakura’s age, and goes to their school, and supposedly Leon and Elise and Camilla and Marx are all relatively close, and somehow they knew Corrin too, who grew up with them in childhood, or something like that.

It doesn’t seem like that to him. Being close to one’s siblings seems like a fake concept, especially if they all hold high and prestigious positions in a well-established and successful family company and live fairly accomplished lives. Takumi doesn’t feel like he’s close to Hinoka or Ryoma, at least, anyway.

The coffee—or maybe the thought—keeps him up even later on in the evening, and when he can’t sleep, he pulls up the search engine on his phone and types in  _ Vindam _ . 

Pictures of Leon in the image search mosaic scatter across his phone’s screen. It feels surreal. Sprinkled throughout are Camilla and Marx, as well, though he isn’t really looking for them. Maybe—maybe a woman who’s tall and blonde, with sleepy brown eyes, or maybe a long nose, or maybe clean thin lips.

The women behind the scenes, however, are oft not seen. Garon’s presence looms past them. In the end, he only has the name. Beatrix—not even Vindam, but Laurent. The shadowy figure without appearance that haunts Leon so, her presence hanging over the offices in busy Midtown and over the tired bags under Leon’s sleepy brown eyes.

 

 

 

 

He’s in the middle of clicking around and making a pattern for a dress at work when Camilla pokes her head into the room.

“It’s nearly one,” she says with concern. “Have you eaten yet?”

“No,” says Takumi. He squints at the program, moves a line a smidgen to the left. “I was going to after I finished this, though.”

“Oh, it’s fine,” Camilla says offhandedly, her voice floating away as she turned to head out. “Let’s go. I was hoping to be able to talk to you about something.”

Takumi swallows. That sounds a little unnerving, but he isn’t about to say no to his boss, or to Leon’s sister, if anything. They both have an oddly persuasive look in their brown eyes that Takumi feels he can’t refuse.

She calls a taxi to take them up thirty blocks, give or take, to a nice restaurant uptown. It’s warm enough for them to sit outside, so they do so, studying the menus under the shade of the awning. Takumi’s hands are still clammy from the nervous ride up.

“This is Leon’s favorite restaurant,” says Camilla from behind her large menu.

“Oh,” says Takumi, unsure what to say. A quick scan through the dishes tells him that it’s mostly French in inspiration and execution. Most of it is too expensive for his not-so-affluent college student lifestyle. He swallows nervously. “Uh.”

“Oh, please don’t worry about not being able to afford it,” says Camilla. “I’ll cover you. It’s only fair, since I asked you to come.”

The knee-jerk reaction for him is to refuse the offer, but he finds he can’t. “O-of course,” he manages. “Thank you.”

She beams, and returns to the menu.

When the waitress comes, she passes the menu over with a confident smile. “The rib-eye steak,” she says. “Medium-rare.”

Takumi orders the same, unsure what to do. She beams at him and sips her water. A few minutes pass before Takumi clears his throat awkwardly.

“Er,” he says eloquently. “Were you going to talk to me about something?”

“Oh, yes,” says Camilla. “In fact, about Leon.”

“O-oh,” says Takumi.

He feels very small, though he wonders if that is, in part, due to her position, or due to her eyes’ alarming resemblance to Leon’s own.

“You care about him, don’t you?”

“Well,” says Takumi. “Yes.”

“I wonder if you might tell me if he is all right.”

Takumi stares at her. “That’s it?” he says dumbly.

“Yes.”

“Um,” says Takumi. He thinks frantically of Leon bent over the toilet like he’s praying, his body convulsing as acid pours out his mouth. “I don’t think so.”

Camilla passes a hand over her mouth, tapping a finger on her chin. “You don’t think so?” she says in her soft voice.

“He—well”—Takumi coughs—“he had a rough week. Something about a bad crit. I mean, critique.”

Something in her gaze makes Takumi feel like a pawn on a chessboard, stuck in his single step forward. “I see,” she says.

Her facade is opaque. He can’t see the board at all.

“I mean,” he starts after a long pause, feeling like he must say something, if anything, “he’s probably. He’s just, hard on himself, being from a talented fashion family.”

“Oh, I’m not talented at all in fashion.” Camilla smiles. “Truly, it’s Leon and Elise who have the eyes and hands for it. I just know how to run a business.”

The waitress comes with their steaks. Takumi clamps his mouth shut until she leaves.

“Well, he takes school really seriously,” he says, trying to justify himself though she had not seemed to ask for it.

“Too seriously, sometimes,” says Camilla absently, neatly cutting her steak. “He’s the type to stay up late working too hard.”

“Yeah,” Takumi manages, unable to find fault with her statement.

They eat. The steaks are cooked perfectly, with pink in the center and a simplicity in flavor he hasn’t had in a long time. They  make small talk about lighter things like school and family. He wants to say more about Leon, but he isn’t sure. Camilla is close to him, or so they say, but he can’t tell if that’s true or not. She’s in control of the conversation. He finds no space to ask.

The waiter takes their plates away, she pays for the meal, and as they get up to leave, Camilla touches his shoulder and says, “Thank you for having lunch and talking with me.”

“Uh,” says Takumi. “It’s no problem.”

“I know it may seem strange and roundabout, to speak of Leon behind his back,” she continues, “but he grows better when nothing is in his way.”

It sounds very vaguely like a warning or a threat. Takumi stops moving, having felt the world shift three inches under his feet. Mouth dry, he nods, trying to figure out how to respond, when a movement from across the street catches his eye. He blinks. It’s a long black coat, a mop of neat blond hair.

The silhouette is too familiar.

“Leon?” he says automatically. Camilla turns to look where he’s looking, but Leon is already walking quickly away.

“Oh,” she says. “I suppose he saw us.”

“Yeah,” says Takumi, unable to say any other words. “Uh—”

He wants nothing more but to chase, but Camilla’s smile and offer of a ride back to work floors him.

He wonders when he’ll be able to say no to a sibling of Vindam.

 

 

 

 

 

It is three days of radio silence from Leon before Takumi gets a text asking for dinner together tonight. There is no mention of Takumi’s lunch with Camilla uptown.

He texts back a  _ yeah of course _ anyway. It isn’t like he’s an unsupportive unloving boyfriend. And it isn’t because he likes that attention from Leon again, running after him the second Leon turns his head and beckons with those sleepy brown eyes.

Leon is relaxed and smiling—not widely, that isn’t his style, but a relaxed expression that might as well be smiling—when Takumi arrives at the restaurant, one of their usual haunts, mostly for the cheap beer and relatively cheap food. Japanese, like Takumi’s used to, and dark noisy intimacy, like they like for their dates. It’s a good sign, the familiarity of the place, the smile on Leon’s face, tonight will be fine.

“Hey,” says Takumi, jogging up. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“No worries. You look good,” says Leon, nodding amiably.

“Th-thanks.”

He’s in a much better mood than the events of that week might have suggested. Takumi wonders, if maybe, Leon might be willing to tell him what happened then. Surely, he must have called Takumi up to dinner to talk about it? Or perhaps, even if he didn’t mention Camilla and the Upper East Side sighting, he might want to ask Takumi about that. 

That thought makes him nervous, with no good reason. There’s nothing to hide there; it was a lunch with his boss. Camilla is his boss. Who wanted to know about Leon, his boyfriend.

Leon smiles, touches the small of his back, and he forgets all his worries.

They’re eventually ushered inside and handed gigantic menus with photographs of naked Japanese women tied up in ropes plastered all over the cover, and Leon hums before ordering a miso soup and curry with a draft beer, like he always does.

After the waiter leaves, neither of them speak. Leon is looking around at the posters on the wall with his usual mild curiosity. The waiter brings them their beers, and eventually, their food. Takumi waits, still, but nothing.

He realizes, then, that if anything, he ought to move the first pawn.

“So,” says Takumi casually. “What’s your mom like?”

The air between them changes from comfortable to stony. Leon stares at him dully, before saying, without any emotion, “I don’t talk about her for a reason.”

“Why not?” says Takumi. “I mean, her reputation kinda precedes her, doesn’t it?”

Leon drinks his beer and ignores him. Takumi stares at him while chewing on his grilled chicken.

Finally, Leon sighs. “Takumi, I don’t want to get into this. I’ve had a long day.”

“I just figured she might have something to do with it.”

“Well, you figured wrong,” says Leon.

“I mean,” says Takumi, “Pressure sucks. I know enough about that. Ryouma nags me all the time about grades and internships and stuff like that.”

Leon shrugs in response. “What makes you think she has anything to do with pressure?”

“Doesn’t she? Every parent does.”

“Stop assuming things that aren’t true in all cases,” says Leon.

“Is it not true in your case?”

“Takumi,” says Leon, with more exasperation. “Please.”

“So it’s not?”

Leon gives no response. He says nothing for the rest of the night. The walk home is cold and hard and Takumi goes to bed seemingly unable to warm back up..

 

 

 

 

 

Two days after he goes out to eat again, but with Sakura. Their dinners are a weekly thing, a dependable constant in Takumi’s life, compared to a stormy blond in his life. Sakura, by all means of comparison, has always been his favorite sibling, the one he feels he can talk to best, and the one he feels probably most genuinely likes him as a human being.

They sit down, order the usual and Takumi sighs. Sakura tilts her head, her newly-dyed pink hair falling around her face.

“Something happen?” she says.

He looks at her.

Perhaps Sakura’s best quality, according to Takumi, is her patience. She is, by far, out of all them, the best listener—never interrupting, never talking over him, never once not paying attention to every word that falls out of his mouth. And when he finishes rambling about Leon, and his stubborn resolve to keep his mouth shut, and his stubborn resolve to lie about his own  _ mother  _ of all things, and his stubborn resolve to never tell him  _ anything  _ at  _ all  _ about his  _ own family  _ which  _ may or may not be important, maybe,  _ Sakura looks at him.

“Have you tried… talking to him?”

Her second-best quality—though its status as second-best is debatable, according to the situation Takumi’s in—is her simple pragmaticism. Perhaps to the point of being, sometimes, thick. According to Takumi.

He shrugs irritably, making little attempt to hide his annoyance. “If he’d talk to  _ me _ , then yeah, I have.”

The waiter, then, arrives with their food. When he leaves, Sakura sighs. “You know, I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing.”

“What do you mean?” Takumi stabs at a piece of meat with his chopsticks. “Like, I’ve given him  _ plenty  _ of opportunities for him to tell me why he’s exactly so angry about me getting an internship at Vindam and why he’s angry that I hung out with his half-sister, who, incidentally,  _ is also my boss! _ ”

“He might not know that you want to talk about it,” Sakura points out. “Have you ever actually brought up that you want to know why he’s upset?”

Takumi opens his mouth, ready to try and list off exactly how and when he told Leon that, except… well, he couldn’t think of any times where he actually did that.

“No,” he says begrudgingly. Sakura gives a shrug and a nod.

“There you go,” she says.

Debatable—the perspective of younger sisters is always clarifying, apparently.

 

 

 

 

 

On Sunday, Takumi texts Leon.  _ Is it ok if we can talk face-to-face? _

_ Fine, _ responds Leon.

At eight o’clock he makes his way to Leon’s room, knocks on the door. Zero is sitting in the kitchen with his giant spread of photos and camera equipment. He watches Takumi go into Leon’s room, like a protective guard, wary for his master’s safety.

“Hey,” says Takumi.

Leon stands up. “Hi,” he says.

A look passes between them for a second, before Takumi inhales.

“Well,” he says, “I’ll—I’ll let you start, in case you want to say something—”

“I don’t have anything to say to you.”

A shot, coldly fired.

“Oh,” says Takumi. “Well, um. I guess I’ll just say that, I feel like. Like.” He swallows nervously. “I feel like you’ve kind of. Been shutting me out. And it’s just like. I’m your boyfriend, you know? You can talk to me about things.”

Leon slowly sits back down in his desk chair. “I know that. You’ve said.”

“Well, sure, but, um.” Takumi reaches into the racks of his mind for words. “I just thought, maybe, letting you know face-to-face, you might. Be more open. Stuff can get lost in texts.”

“Fair enough,” says Leon, fixing his gaze on his box of fabric swatches. Takumi stares at it with him for a few seconds, before swallowing again.

“Leon,” Takumi says carefully. “Talk to me. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” says Leon automatically. “I have a lot of things in my life, is all.”

“Like, what, your family?” Takumi ventures. “Your mother? Your sister? Are you in a fight with them? I mean, Camilla’s my boss, I can, I don’t know, help—”

“It’s none of your business.”

“It’s everything of my business!”

“Why does it matter?” says Leon, less a question and more a quiet string of words.

“You’re—you’re clearly suffering because of it!” Takumi says. “And I just wish, like, you could trust me enough to talk about it to me!”

Leon glances at him briefly and then points his gaze out the window. The lights in the building across scatter all over its façade. “You wouldn’t understand,” he says distantly.

“Of course I can’t, because you won’t tell me about it!”

“It doesn’t matter,” insists Leon quietly. “I can deal with it myself.”

“Well, it should matter, because I thought I knew you and now I feel like I don’t at all!” Takumi clenches his fist. “And I get that maybe your family’s not something you want to talk about all the time, but  _ clearly  _ it matters to you, and you’re, fucking, throwing up about it and not talking to me and you won’t kiss me—”

“It has nothing to do with you,” Leon says, still not looking at him.

“It has  _ everything  _ to do with me, because I care about you, damn it!” Takumi slams a fist on the wall. “And you’re hurting, and I’m hurting, and everything  _ sucks! _ ”

Leon is silent for a long time. Takumi ignores the throbbing pain in his hand and tries to even his breathing.

“Maybe,” says Leon slowly, his gaze still fixed out the window into the distance. “Maybe we should… take a break, then.”

Takumi lets out a short, sharp bark of a laugh. “Maybe, since you won’t let me care about you.”

Leon’s expression hardens. For a heartbeat, it feels like words are trembling at the back of his throat, but when he opens his small mouth, it’s only to say, “Fine, then.”

“Fine,” echoes Takumi.

He turns to leave, and before he closes the door, he can see out of the corner of his eye, Leon reaching for his lighter.

Fine. Takumi hates the taste of cigarettes anyway.

 

 

 

 

 

Hinata’s playing his weird hack-and-slash video game when Takumi comes back to their room. Takumi drops his bag on the ground and puts on his pajamas.

“Are you going to bed?” asks Hinata.

“Maybe.”

Hinata gives him a kind of look like,  _ I’m sorry, dude _ , but Takumi doesn’t really feel like saying anything. He throws his jacket over his chair and lets his ponytail down.

“You okay? You seem kinda quiet,” says Hinata.

Takumi climbs into bed. “I’m fine,” he says.

“All right,” replies Hinata. He puts his big headphones back on and turns around to his video game. Takumi watches the pixelated blood splatter on the screen.

_ Leon _ , he thinks, unbidden. Then, in Leon’s voice:  _ it has nothing to do with you _ .

Of course not. It’s just Takumi, being sensitive. Something like that.

Oboro’s phone call with her parents drifts through the walls, muffled Japanese and English. Hinata’s button smashing clicks softly, the light of his desk lamp falling across the floor. Somewhere above them, footsteps, and then in the distance, the ding of the dorm’s elevator.

Takumi closes his eyes. They feel warm behind his eyelids, like he might cry or something. He relaxes and tries to will the tears to come—Mikoto always said crying would help him feel better. Nothing. Nothing.

A stray thought passes through the front of his mind— _ maybe I should just die to save myself from this humiliation. _

Shut up, shut up. He turns over in bed to look at the wall. Stop thinking that.

He tries again to cry, just for something to do that might help. Nothing. Nothing.


End file.
